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That is very '90s, pre-programming-language-Renaissance thinking. If that thinking actually dominated, then you would never have seen the rise of Python, Ruby, Go, Node, Perl, PHP, Scala, Clojure, and so forth during the 2000s and 2010s. During the '90s, people predicted that Java would be the last programming language that anyone would ever use, using the same kinds of reasoning. That turned out to be false. > You may be swayed toward Rust by the fact that Rust is memory safe. However, when someone comes and tells you that with this open source tool for C++ backed by the big names in C++, and developed and supported by Microsoft, and just by using the GSL types you can get most of the benefit of Rust, you will decide that the delta of improvement of Rust over C++ is not worth it. Replace "Rust" with "Ruby on Rails", "C++" with "Java", and "GSL types" with "Spring", and you could make the same statement in 2005. It might even sound plausible. It would also be an incredibly wrong prediction. > There are already billions of lines of C++ in mission-critical production use. How many lines of memory-safe C++ are there in production use? The amount of memory-safe Rust code far exceeds that. Ergonomics and the ecosystem matter. The fact is that the proposed static analysis tool for C++ is very restrictive and complex, from everything I've seen so far, and coupled with the annotation burden equal to that of Rust effectively makes it into a completely different language. |